Schlagwort-Archive: Post-Racial Discourse

Over the past three years the media in the United States has drawn attention to the epidemic of racist murders perpetrated by police officers against unarmed young black men and women (the five murders that received the most attention were those of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland and Freddie Gray). These events provoked new protests against police brutality and our racist system of mass incarceration at the same time that the media and our politicians portrayed each murder as an “exception” to the norm of a just Justice system that was no longer informed by structural discrimination against African Americans. As President Obama has reminded the nation after every publicized police murder of a young black man, we “have come a long way” since the Civil Rights era of legal segregation and Jim Crow. Since Obama’s election as the first black president of the United States, the media has referred to the American present as a ‘post-racial’ society and scholars have started to explore how this ‘post-racial discourse’ has informed (mis)representations of state violence and precluded opportunities for political activism in the United States. Weiterlesen →